As someone who was let down by Jirard's choice to double down and threaten his accusers, I actually don't think he needs to be removed. If anything, the fact that his role in the game is to take donations becomes more of a snarky meta commentary. I get that Sabotage studio is probably really hurt by this given their close relationship with IndieLand, and they have every right to do whatever they want with their art, but experiencing the irony here should be preserved and available to the public.
I get if they dont want an homage character to become a biting satire of a former business partner. Especially if they dont want someone to not get the bit, and think less of the game for having a known scammer cameo in it
Not that its really even their fault, seeing as this came out before the charity mess did
Having kept up on the drama I'm sure Jirard was devastated by this. He's built a brand on being a nice guy, but be it by malfeasance, or incompetence he screwed up royaly. Hope we get the full story and find out he and his family are just idiots, not criminals. Especially with it all steming from his mother's illness.
The evidence does point to just pure incompetence but it's hard to believe he didn't know that none of the money had been sent over the past decade, especially since he claimed multiple times they spent it. If not him, someone in the charity must've stolen the money and lied to him. Guess we'll wait and see.
So we don't know the whole story, but he was removed from the game, anyway? Not cool.
Thierry can do whatever he wants with his game, but ending a long and profitable (both emotionally and financially, presumably) friendship simply because of unproven allegations seems like a very short-sighted, fear-driven move.
They did it to protect the brand or whatever, but actions like this harm the brand in my eyes. Shows they care more about public perception than truth and justice. I, for one, will be removing Sea of Stars from my wishlist because of this.
Unless Thierry comes out and says he knew all along about The Completionist, which is literally the only way to justify such a preemptive sanction, he has irreparably harmed his integrity, IMO.
Yeah it's hard to speculate right now and we may never know. Jirard's story changed so much between the phone call and his YouTube response. Much like you given the nature of where this stemmed from I'd like to attribute it to screwing up than anything else because it's pretty dark otherwise.